One day last week, after Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of a U.S. Senate judiciary committee that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17 — and the adult Kavanaugh denied it — I found a voicemail on my office phone. A woman who had heard a radio interview I had given about media coverage of the controversy wanted me to know that, many years ago, she had been sexually assaulted at the university where I teach, and that the administration had done nothing.

There was not enough detail in the message for me to investigate or report anything, and the woman did not leave her full name. I can’t be certain what her intent was, but I assume it was to communicate her anger and pain and, perhaps, by doing so, relieve some of it. Perhaps, too, she intended to place some responsibility on me for the policies and behaviour of the institution in which I work.

This is an extraordinary moment. Many women are uncorking the memories of experiences they have felt unable to express, and others are re-evaluating the meaning of their experiences in the light of new cultural understandings and norms. For men, this is an enormous challenge. For some, there is fear. For others, confusion. There is a lot of anger, as we saw last week when Kavanaugh testified. And there is the consciousness that, in our complacency, we may have been complicit.

This cuts much more deeply into our social relations — with our partners and children at home, and with our colleagues at work — than even the most contentious political issues on pipelines or health care or trade. And it means that everything that appears in the media treads on tender ground.

I’ve written here before about the reporting that began in this country with the Toronto Star’s coverage of the allegations against former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi, and in the United States with the coverage by the New York Times and the New Yorker about former film producer Harvey Weinstein. There will inevitably be cases, as this era sweeps over us, of men being unfairly tarnished. But the record of news coverage so far is the opposite. By being careful, by cross-checking allegations with provable facts, by reporting rather than simply believing, what journalists have written in major publications has stood up remarkably well.

The controversy about #MeToo journalism has shifted lately to something else. Not so much the reporting, but the publication of opinion, of points of view. Harper’s magazine published a piece by John Hockenberry, an American public radio host whose career was wrecked after allegations of sexual misconduct at work; the New York Review of Books published Ghomeshi’s apologia (which was notably light on apology) entitled “Reflections on a Hashtag”; and, last week, the Calgary Herald published an op-ed entitled “Kavanaugh doesn’t deserve this. What happened in high school stays in high school,” which led some city councillors to declare they would no longer give interviews to Herald reporters.

Journalistically, the point of opinion pieces is to air diverse views: sometimes views that editors disagree with. It is to provide a kind of virtual public square in which we can hear the unfiltered voices of people with strong opinions in our community that may challenge our own. Commercially, of course, publishing a hot take or a contrarian viewpoint is likely to win you clicks and eyeballs.

If you don’t think about it carefully, it’s easy to imagine that, unlike with reporting, editors shouldn’t have much of a role in editing opinion pieces. Maybe fix the grammar and spelling; make sure it conforms to house style. After all, “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion,” and “it’s a free country, after all.”

But that is not right. At least, that is not the journalistic tradition. Even opinion pieces should not distort or misstate facts. Nor is the reader served if the argument is incoherent, and therefore not the strongest possible version of the viewpoint it espouses. Furthermore, it should not outrage civic decency, difficult as that may be to define, and as particular as that may be to a community or a publication.

As documented by Canadaland’s Jesse Brown (who helped to break the original story in the Toronto Star), the Ghomeshi piece in the New York Review of Books was replete with false and misleading statements of fact. These should have been addressed in the editing process. When the editor of the magazine, Ian Buruma, was interviewed by Slate, he seemed uninformed and surprisingly uninterested in the underlying facts of the case. (Buruma resigned shortly afterward.)

When the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed the publisher of Harper’s about the Hockenberry piece, he seemed to have an uncertain grasp of the definition of sexual harassment. When Tremonti challenged him, he eventually objected to her “tone of voice,” saying that what she was saying rose “to the level of Soviet-style re-education.” It was an embarrassment, and not to Tremonti (who was stationed in Moscow in the Soviet era).

And then there was the op-ed in the Calgary Herald. You can disagree with the thesis that there should be a “statute of limitations” on what happened in high school, without saying the column should not have been published. After all, many jurisdictions have statutes of limitation on the prosecution of certain crimes, and that’s a legitimate topic of debate.

But the op-ed did not meet minimal standards of coherence. At times, the author, Naomi Lakritz, a Calgary journalist, implied that Kavanaugh had never committed a sexual assault, calling the current investigation a “witch hunt.” There were, after all, no actual witches in Salem. But of course, the idea that “what happens in high school should stay in high school” implies there was an underlying misdeed. And the idea of a high school “statute of limitations” does not address an obvious problem: If Kavanaugh did commit the assault Ford has accused him of, that means he is lying now and has committed perjury. By requiring Lakritz to address these issues, an editor would have done both Lakritz and the readers a favour.

Even if you think the normal standards of coherence in newspaper opinion these days are lower than I am suggesting they should be, there is one sentence that should not have escaped the editor’s red pen: “The Kavanaugh case should strike fear into the hearts of all men, because it means that no matter how sterling a reputation you have in your adult life and career, something dumb you may or may not have been involved with in high school can forever come back to haunt you.”

Something dumb? The allegation is an attempted rape. Characterizing that as “something dumb” outrages public morals — or at least it should.

It is impossible to know whether an editor at the Herald looked at this piece carefully when it was submitted and chose deliberately to put it in the paper with all its flaws, knowing the attention it would get. Or, perhaps, in these staff-straitened days, it got the quick glance-over and no one quite noticed the problems. In an obvious attempt at a cleanup, the Herald subsequently published an editorial, essentially echoing Patrick Henry’s declaration: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Of course, Henry never suggested a publisher was required to publish any opinion piece pushed through the mail slot.

As the voicemail reminded me the other day, the debate over Brett Kavanaugh is dropping into people’s lives and pressing on a place of deep pain. It is an editor’s job to think about things like that.